Der Blog

Ruination

Sat, 05 May 2012 18:18:00 -0700

Prepare thyselves, mortals, for you shall bear witness to a sin against reality and a turpitude upon decency and joy.

I bring to you: ruination.

Ruination

Sometimes, when I ask Terra where something is located in our domicile, she will reply, “Under the sink.” I will invariably launch into a rendition of “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid. I’ve been trying to be nice, lately, and have only sung it to myself, in my head. But trust me gentlebeings: it always happens. Every time I hear the phrase, “Under the sink,” it is immediately followed by that song, playing in my head. I’ve been ruined, you see.

This also happens if someone says, “I’m so excited.” It’s an even split between hearing the Pointer Sisters’ smash hit and seeing Jessie Spano’s caffeine pill freakout, but it, also, always happens. More ruination.

Similarly: if someone has gone through some turmoil recently and I ask that person how she’s holding up, if she replies, “I’ll survive,” then it gets all Gaynored up in this piece.

Ruination.

My Brain, My Future, My Fear

Ruts have been driven into my brain, you see. I have these tracks that have been driven over so many times in my head that they’ve become rote, nearly autonomic Pavlovian responses. They can strike without warning, swooping in upon musical wings to peck at the eyes of my attention and caw manically as they swoop away to swarm over the bloated corpse of my former train of thought. I’ve been ruined.

I will always be like this. These little jokes that my brain has been playing on me have gone on for some ten years or so and I don’t expect they’ll go away. They don’t intrude upon my life. I’m not OCDed into flipping some light switch exactly twenty-seven times for fear the world will end if I don’t complete it exactly. But they will be my constant companions, little viruses lying latent in the nerve centers of my mental state waiting for the proper moment to pustulate upon the surface of my thoughts.

Once I diagnosed my condition, my fear is that I will gain more. I’ve counted at least three so far. Three stow-aways that have taken root in my brain’s garden, sprouting flowers of distraction that drive the honeybees of my thoughts to buzz away from the fruitful blooms of rational pursuits. Alas.

Your Turn

Unfortunately, I may have just ruined you. By given name to my own imps, I may have coaxed yours out of the shadows to poke and pester your brain when it would be better off having interesting conversations about delicious cheeses or meditating upon the symmetries of nature’s bounty.

Because, after all: darlin’ it’s better, down where it’s wetter.

Take it from me.

Valentine

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 21:03:31 -0700

Valentine

Photo

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 21:51:52 -0700

My car

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:02:55 -0700

My car was the first thing I bought after I graduated college and got my first programming job. It was a sweet 2000 Honda Prelude, in silver.

I friggin’ loved my car. I’m not a car person by any measure, but I loved it. It only looked like a sports car, and, truthfully, the Accord had way more horsepower and better 0-60 times, and blah blah blah.

I loved that car.

I met my wife in that car. I squeezed way too many of my friends way too many times into that car. I was forced to clean way too many questionable liquids out of its various crevices too many times. The car became inextricably linked with a certain time of my adulthood.

And then.

That car drove me and my brother out to San Francisco when I got the job at Google two years ago. San Francisco is hard on people who own cars; there’s not a lot of parking space, and the parking spaces there are are very expensive. I took to leaving the car at Google on weekends. Then for a couple of weeks. Then a month.

Then I had an epileptic seizure.

There’s no driving after you’ve had a seizure. At least, not for about six months. That meant my car was trapped in Mountain View, a guest of the Google parking lots, for at least that long.

This funny thing happened: I didn’t really need a car. The MUNI is pretty reliable, ZipCar works for short jaunts around the city, and my leg muscles got a nice workout in the hills. And parking is such a pain, and so expensive, and gas is so expensive, and blah blah blah.

But I still loved that car.

Lately, though, I’d reached a decision point. The car sat in the Google parking lots for a long time, and my wife and I had clearly outgrown it. With the coming addition to our family, we’d really outgrown it; where were we gonna fit a car seat, anyway? The thought of fixing it, bringing it back up north, squeezing it into some already ordered life, getting gas for goodness’ sakes…

I’ve had that car for twelve years. It was time to say goodbye.

I donated my car today. It’s the right decision, but I’m still upset. It brought me here, literally and figuratively. It’s filled with good memories. But sometimes memories hold up better to life’s changing circumstances than physical objects. I know it all sounds dramatic, but I only know how I feel at this moment.

Goodbye, car. Well done, thou good and faithful servant.

The hard part

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 21:37:06 -0700

Here comes the hard part.

The basic coding part of my personal site is complete. My cron jobs are running, pulling content from Tumblr, Twitter, Pinboard, and Last.fm. All of that is ending up in the datastore in the right way. Things look good.

But, hey, coding is what I’m good at. I knew I would reach this point with not a lot of problems. But the whole point of this project was to change the UI design of my personal site. And now I can.

Great, I guess.

I’m less sure how to do the UI side of things. I don’t have any firm ideas about what I want my site to look like, but I know a blog-style presentation of date-descending posts is not what I want. I want something that is more analog, less a visual representation of a database schema and a more fluid representation of my online identity. That’s one of the smaller reasons I cancelled my Facebook account. I think humans are bigger than a series of rectilinear slices of online experience, less scalar than a bunch of concrete demographics. I’m just not sure how to do that on a webpage.

Maybe this isn’t just the hard part; maybe it’s the fun part, too.

Uh, I want this. Right now. For my house. Which I don’t...

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 12:07:21 -0700

Uh, I want this. Right now. For my house. Which I don’t own. But I will.

"More awesome than a monkey wearing a tuxedo made out of bacon riding a cyborg unicorn with a..."

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 12:05:00 -0700

“More awesome than a monkey wearing a tuxedo made out of bacon riding a cyborg unicorn with a lightsaber for the horn on the tip of a space shuttle closing in on Mars, while ingulfed in flames.”

- http://boingboing.net/2012/03/16/more-awesome-than-a-monkey-i.html

My grandma

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 22:44:42 -0800

My grandmother, Maria Antonia Melendez, died on Wednesday, February 8th. She was over 100 years old.

My grandma was my third parent; she helped raise me and shape me in so many ways.

My grandma was a devout Catholic who told me to go to church as often as she told me she loved me. I’m spiritual, but not religious — formal churches and I don’t get along, and I tended to keep silent about the matter with my grandmother. Once, though, I told her that I didn’t agree with much of what the church did, didn’t like the people who ran it, and couldn’t support it by attending. She replied that I was going to support my relationship with God and not the people who made up the church, so why let them spoil it? She had a point.

Because of her, I’ve never understood the concept of Catholic guilt. Every time she told me to go to church, all I ever heard was, “I love you.”

My grandma played a mean hand of Bullshit (Liar’s Poker if you’re feeling PG). Her favorite ploy was the old lady card: “I forgot what we’re on. What are we on? Jacks?” “No, Queens, Grandma.” “Oh, alright. Three Jacks — I mean, Queens.” I remember her winning more than her fair share of those games.

My family used to go on cabining trips to Ruidoso, New Mexico. My grandma would tell scary stories to all the cousins and then, late at night, would sneak outside and scratch on the window to scare us.

She hated that I smoked and I think she would’ve been proud of me quitting after she died… even as she would have been understanding if I don’t stay quit.

She was white once, but only for a little while until her brothers stopped her from working at the lemonade stand. That’s a longer story, though.

Because of my grandma, Spanglish reminds me of home and comforts me. “Da me la whisk,” she would say.

When I was being a brat, I would lean over so she could conk me on the head since she couldn’t reach when I was standing up straight.

I’m sad, but not for her. She’s had an incredible, unbelievable life. I’m sad for me. I’m sad that my grandma won’t be there to see our baby born. She won’t be there when I have questions about how to instill a spiritual life in our child (even though we’re not going full Catholic). She won’t be there for me.

I miss her so much.

First!

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:24:00 -0800

This marks the first time that I’ve actually posted a text entry to my Tumblr. That’s a little weird, but I’m fickle about my software, and it took me a long time to decide that Tumblr was my winner.

Heck, I was even going to write my own CMS running on AppEngine before I realized that I do not want to write blogging software.

So, yeah… this is my first post. Whee!

Darwin is frisky.

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:25:49 -0800

Darwin is frisky.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:02:08 -0700

Whatever Internet-connected computer is in front of me at the moment.

Or maybe my piano.

Saturday night http://t.co/VTFUr0fu

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 02:04:16 -0700

Saturday night http://t.co/VTFUr0fu

RT @IamUARS: AAAAAAAaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!! #UARS

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 13:14:15 -0700

RT @IamUARS: AAAAAAAaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!! #UARS

RT @donpark: Godspeed? Nay, Good SPDY! http://t.co/hhVRXgnE

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 00:18:52 -0700

RT @donpark: Godspeed? Nay, Good SPDY! http://t.co/hhVRXgnE

Thanks to @CarlAllenBrown I’ve played “Temple Run” for like two hours straight....

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 10:56:25 -0700

Thanks to @CarlAllenBrown I’ve played “Temple Run” for like two hours straight. And those were fun hours.

The Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 06:57:29 -0700

The Age of Mechanical Reproduction

RT @traxionary: “Don’t Stop Believing” (Journey) http://preview.tinyurl.com/482vg7o #identity...

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 11:40:15 -0700

RT @traxionary: “Don’t Stop Believing” (Journey) http://preview.tinyurl.com/482vg7o #identity #affect #journey #believing @JourneyOffici …

RT @chrysb: You can tell it’s a bubble because startups are raising so much money they can...

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 12:48:11 -0700

RT @chrysb: You can tell it’s a bubble because startups are raising so much money they can actually afford vowels in their domain names.

RT @danctheduck: Quilting = the ultimate multiplayer ‘casual’ game. Not that it is...

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 21:20:39 -0700

RT @danctheduck: Quilting = the ultimate multiplayer ‘casual’ game. Not that it is casual in the least. Quilting is hardcore.

Me llamo D-bone la araña discoteca.

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 08:17:24 -0700

Me llamo D-bone la araña discoteca.